April 21, 2007

"The Year of the Dog," with Saturday Night Live veteran Molly Shannon as a spinster secretary looking for love, sounds like just another romantic comedy, such as "The Truth about Cats and Dogs" or "Must Love Dogs." Yet, this sympathetic portrayal of the making of an animal rights activist / pest turns out to be one of the odder and more memorable movies of the year so far....

PETA fanatics are the one sort of progressive that everybody loves to look down upon. After Dutch immigration restrictionist Pim Fortuyn was gunned down in 2002, the European center-left establishment immediately proclaimed (wrongly, as it turned out) that their vilification of anti-immigrationists had nothing to do with Fortuyn's murder. The assassin was just some animal rights loony!

And yet, the animal rights cause is likely to triumph partially. As the world gets richer, the worst abuses of factory farming will become less tolerable. Moreover, while we deplore Koreans' taste for dog, hardheaded Paul Johnson has suggested that our descendents won't understand how we complacently devoured the comparably intelligent pig. Too bad they're so tasty …

April 20, 2007

Stephen Hunter: Less Park's "Oldboy" than Woo's "The Killer:" The Washington Post's Pulitzer-winning film critic Stephen Hunter analyzes my guess that the Virginia Tech mass murderer was influenced by the South Korean film "Oldboy." Maybe, he says, but:

Many of Cho's pictures -- 11 out of 43 -- featured guns. And when I looked at them, another name struck me as far more relevant than Park Chan Wook. That's John Woo.

Hunter definitely knows his guns! I reviewed for VDARE Hunter's nonfiction book, American Gunfight, about the 1950 terrorist assault by Puerto Rican nationalists that nearly succeeded in assassinating President Truman.

There have been many demands this week that colleges take pre-emptive action against odd-behaving students to prevent more mass slaughters like at Virginia Tech.

My initial reaction is that I have very little faith in college administrations' ability to identify the truly dangerous, and suspect new powers would mostly be used to further persecute the politically and socially unpopular and inconvenient.

Perhaps, though, I'm wrong. To evaluate proposed remedies for college shootings, it would be worth better understanding the causes of the rise and fall of high school shootings by students. These began primarily in the 1990s and notoriously culminated at Columbine in 1999, then continued onward for a couple of years.

In March 2001, I covered for UPI the Santana H.S. massacre in Santee outside of San Diego, where a 9th grader shot two peers and wounded 13 more. That night, I counted 31 satellite TV trucks at the improvised media center. At 11pm, I watched nine television reporters simultaneously, side-by-side, begin their top-of-the-hour reports from in front of the makeshift shrine at the Santee sign. My feeling at the time was that we in the press were driving this epidemic of copycat high school shootings through our overkill coverage. By showing up, I was part of the problem and was just going to contribute to the next Columbine-style shooting by some little creep who wanted to get on TV.

And, yet ... after Santana, this whole bloody trend just seemed to peter out. The number of truly Columbine-style kids-shooting-kids massacres in the U.S. dropped sharply. (Gang-bangers keep shooting each other in front of high schools, but white Americans don't really care, as long as they stay away from their kids.) It was like "going postal," which had earlier gone into remission (although there was a recent relapse).

How come? Did American schools actually start to do the right thing to prevent shootings? If so, what was it? Or did it just fade out as mysteriously as it started?

Few subjects have inspired so many words and so few insights in recent years as murderous rampages. First, post office employees became notorious for running amok. Then it was middle class high school students. Lately, it's been disgruntled private sector workers. We're only beginning to uncover clues about what causes these small-scale but horrifying fads.

Other cultures have found themselves beset by a tendency for men to suddenly lash out in vicious, often suicidal attacks on the people around them. Running "amok" is the Malay term for man who responds to an insult or humiliation by frenziedly chopping up his neighbors with a machete knife. According to U. of Massachusetts' psychologist James Averill, it was so common in the East Indies in the early 19th century "that all villages kept a long pole with a fork on the end for immobilizing an amok runner." Fortunately, it became less customary in these lands in the 20th century.

In the America of the late Eighties and early Nineties, the urge to massacre one's acquaintances seemed largely confined to employees of the U.S. Post Office. Postal workers first started "going postal" - a bit of pseudo-teen slang coined by Amy Heckerling for her 1995 movie "Clueless - in Edmond, Oklahoma in 1986, when a city carrier murdered 14 coworkers. Through April 1998, 34 postal employees had died in 15 such onslaughts by their colleagues. Since 1998, however, "going postal" seems to have gone out of fashion as mysteriously as it began.

The Postal Service commissioned a 2000 report on the killings by former Carter Cabinet Secretary Joseph Califano. His study downplayed the danger to postal employees. It showed that cab drivers were 150 times more likely to be murdered than post office workers. The report, however, sidestepped the question of whether U.S.P.S. workers were more likely to slaughter their coworkers than the average worker. Further, it did not explain why post office shootings suddenly began in 1986.

As postal employees suddenly became less violent at the end of the Nineties, corporate workers seemed to step in to take up the slack. The recent carnage at the Navistar plant in Melrose Park, Illinois was only one example of a spate of such shootings.

In between the heydays of "going postal" and "going corporate," white Americans became obsessed by a series of school shootings, climaxing in the infamous 1999 Columbine H.S. slaughter in Littleton, Colorado.

Violence in the schools has long been a problem in neighborhoods where violence in the streets is common. But murderous rampages in middle class schools were quite rare until only a few years ago.

A Secret Service study of 37 Columbine-style incidents found that the first similar incident occurred in 1974. Then, in 1979 a schoolgirl in San Diego shot two people. Her explanation for why she did it provided the title of the Boomtown Rats' nihilistic hit song "I Don't Like Mondays."

Nonetheless, the great school-shooting spree did not begin until the later Nineties. This suggests a copycat mentality, probably spread by the overwhelming television coverage of school shootings. ABC, CBS, and NBC alone aired 296 stories on Columbine.

Even two weeks after that mass murder, one could still turn on the TV at almost any hour of the day and find anywhere from two to ten channels blaring about "Terror in the Rockies." It costs little these days to send a remote truck to broadcast from the scene of the crime. Thus, every channel feels obligated to have their own reporter standing in front of the school building mouthing clichés.

The diversification of media channels due to cable TV and the Internet was supposed to lead to a greater variety of subjects being covered on the Information Superhighway. Instead, we seem to have entered the age of "one story at a time" journalism, where everything else going on in the world is dropped in favor of all the news channels simultaneously broadcasting live coverage of some poor high school kid's funeral.

Not surprisingly, Columbine in turn inspired a rash of planned shootings and bomb plots. Fortunately, many were headed off by newly paranoid police and school administrators.

In recent weeks, three school murder plots came to light when other teenagers snitched on the would-be murderers. Encouraging kids to squeal appears to be the most promising strategy for preventing school shootings. The Secret Service found, "In over three quarters of the cases, the attacker told someone before the attack about his interest in mounting an attack at the school. In over half of the incidents, the attacker told more than one person about his ideas/plans." While workplace murderers are generally stereotypical loners, school killers seem to crave attention and even psychological reinforcement from their peers.

In contrast, according to the Secret Service, the widespread attempts to develop an accurate profile of kids likely to become rampage killers has failed: "There is no accurate or useful profile of the 'the school shooter.'" Unlike workplace shooters, who tend to be fairly well educated middle aged failures with a history of mental problems, the only true common denominator of high school shooters is that they are all boys.

Further, while school slaughterers do tend to be somewhat alienated and in emotional turmoil, that vague profile would cover maybe half of all teenagers. The Secret Service concludes, "The great majority of students who fit any given profile will not actually pose a risk of targeted violence."

This wouldn't have worked at Virginia Tech, however, since the close-mouthed Cho seldom spoke to anybody.

April 19, 2007

Lesbian LSU women's basketball coach sexually exploits her players -- NYT worries about "homophobia!" Just last week, the New York Times was in a tizzy about how three words on a radio program could ruin the lives of the delicate flowers of the Rutgers women's basketball team. This week, a lesbian college basketball coach who controls the athletic fates of her LSU players has been discovered to be sexually exploiting them ... and the NYT is now concerned that this might hurt the career prospects of other lesbian coaches.

The NYT article begins:

In Recruiting Season, Mistrust Is Raised at L.S.U.By JERÉ LONGMAN

Caption: Some coaches, administrators and academics say they fear that the accusations against Chatman, right, will inflame homophobia.

Now that the women's college basketball season has ended, many coaches are on the road recruiting through mid-May. And, some said in recent interviews, they could face fallout from last month's resignation of Pokey Chatman from Louisiana State, following charges of what the university described yesterday for the first time as inappropriate sexual relationships between her and former players.

"This is everyone's worst nightmare," Mary Jo Kane, director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota, said during widespread discussion of the Chatman case during the N.C.A.A. tournament.

At its heart, L.S.U. officials said, the Chatman case is about abuse of trust or power. Yet some coaches, administrators and academics say they fear that the accusations against Chatman will inflame homophobia; reinforce stereotypes of lesbians as sexual predators; lead to more so-called negative recruiting, or attempts to steer players away from coaches suspected of being gay; increase skepticism toward the hiring of single women as head coaches; and scare the parents of potential recruits.

It's just too horrible to imagine that the purity of the college basketball recruiting process could be sullied by homophobia. Think of the children!

It's reassuring that in this ever-changing world in which we live in that the New York Times always has its priorities in order, with, year in and year out, homosexuals' prerogatives at the very top of the list.

By the way, Ms. Chatman was paid $400,000 per year plus a $70,000 bonus when the team reached the Final Four after her resignation in disgrace. And other sources suggest that "the former players" weren't so former when the relationships began. LSU refuses to state that the relationships didn't begin with current players, so it's reasonable to assume the worst.

continues to dominate television ratings with a product that just isn't terribly deplorable. The success of the contest at finding unexploited commercial singing talent, especially female talent, shows up the inefficiency and corruption of the traditional music industry, which fails to maximize profits because too many male executives prefer to exploit their power to promote pretty but untalented girls who will sleep with them rather than to find the best singers. Further, the contest format gives nice, unassertive people like this year's standout, Melinda Doolittle (a 29-year-old professional back-up singer with a near Gladys Knight-quality voice but a shy, unassuming personality), a chance to shine in a business where pushiness is normally a prerequisite.

One striking difference between American Idol and the spate of lesser reality TV shows is that, surprisingly, it doesn't reward diva attitudes and bitchiness on the part of the contestants (the judges provide more than enough of that). The show has consistently resisted the temptation to put cameras in wherever it is that the contestants are lodged. It would be easy to encourage the contestants to engage in backstage backbiting and undermining each other on camera, like on Big Brother and all its imitators, but the show doesn't do that. One reason is that American Idol isn't American Idle -- the contestants who make it past the early auditions to Hollywood are working hard in rehearsal all week to get ready to put on two shows a week, and thus don't have as much time to connive against each other.

Another reason is because singing is a more objective undertaking than just being a media personality. Radio psychiatrist Dr. Drew Pinsky gave the standard Narcissistic Personality Inventory test to scores of minor celebrities that came on the "Loveline" radio show he hosted with Adam Carolla and found that the most narcissistic were the least talented -- the female reality TV stars of the moment were the most narcissistic, while the most talented, the musicians, were the least. If you are an excellent musician, you are always aware that there are truly great musicians out there. Melinda Doolittle knows that as good as she is, she's not as good as, say, Whitney Houston was in her (brief) prime.

Indeed, one of the rare pleasures of American Idol is the initial open audition shows when the talentless egomaniacs are sent home with curt, but valuable, advice to find a different career. In an America that constantly propagandizes about how everyone can achieve their goals if only they never forget their dreams, yada yada, Simon Cowell offers some useful English realism.

One thing that surprised Cowell a half decade ago was how little the American public cared about singers' looks. Being beautiful, like last year's runner-up Katherine McPhee, or cute, like the previous year's winner Carrie Underwood, helps, of course, but being fat (e.g., winner Rueben Stoddard), funny-looking (winner Fantasia and popular runner-up Clay Aiken), or gray-haired (winner Taylor Hicks) doesn't hurt as much as it would in Britain.

My wife has been guessing for some time that the winner this year will be 17-year-old Jordin Sparks, the cheerful mulatto daughter of a retired NFL cornerback and a blonde. Sparks, who has done some plus-sized modeling, is cute but not sexy, which is becoming in somebody so young. Sparks is a fine singer but not as strong as Doolittle or, when she's on her game, big LaKisha Jones. But the complex interaction of race and musical style just might favor young Sparks.

This year, the male singers have been below average, and without a strong white female country singer like Underwood or first winner Kelly Clarkson, the black women have dominated. Although they always put a cute white rocker chick in the top dozen, American Idol isn't conducive to singing electric guitar rock, for which you need your own small band, so that leaves country as the only genre where experienced white women have an advantage over black women on the show. The other good genres for the show are either black, such as Motown, or old-fashioned, such as show tunes, where the black advantage in raw vocal talent gives black women the advantage.

But there have been so many good black women this year, and they never have that all big a voting bloc among the public (the modal voter -- an adolescent white girl would prefer, all else being equal, to vote for somebody she identifies with), so they've cut into each other's vote, with LaKisha almost being sent home this week. (Howard Stern's novelty candidate Sanjaya was sent packing instead). The same thing happened in the third year, when Fantasia, who is black, won. Another tremendous black singer, Jennifer Hudson, the new Oscar-winner for "Dreamgirls," finished seventh, despite a lot of praise from the judges. Without Fantasia in the running, Hudson might well have won, but there wasn't enough support from the public for black women for both of them to make it to the last night.

Because she can sing black or white, Jordin Sparks thus looks well-poised to win the vote this year.

If she does well, that would be more evidence for a phenomenon I've been vaguely noticing for some time -- the rise of a Mulatto Elite in public life, to some extent displacing African-Americans raised in a conventionally black background. Perhaps it's just that there are more people with one black parent and one white parent today. But I suspect it's also that traditional African-Americans, in general, are getting ever more into their own narrow black groove and thus slowly losing touch with the rest of the country. For example, Levitt and Dubner wrote:

"The California data establish just how dissimilarly black and white parents have named their children over the past 25 years or so—a remnant, it seems, of the Black Power movement. The typical baby girl born in a black neighborhood in 1970 was given a name that was twice as common among blacks than whites. By 1980, she received a name that was 20 times more common among blacks. (Boys' names moved in the same direction but less aggressively—likely because parents of all races are less adventurous with boys' names than girls'.) Today, more than 40 percent of the black girls born in California in a given year receive a name that not one of the roughly 100,000 baby white girls received that year."

Giving your baby one of these stereotypically black names exposes your child to discrimination on the job market (as resume tests have shown). But blacks seem to be willing to have their children pay that price in the name of racial solidarity. Giving your baby a name like LaKisha is a way of branding her permanently with black culture so that she is less able to step away from it if she chooses.

As conventional blacks increasingly concentrate in only a handful of fields (e.g., just basketball and football in sports) and make a fetish of keepin' it real, of not "acting white," they are losing touch with the interests of the white majority, even as whites become ever more positive toward black talents. In their place, those individuals who are part black genetically, but had at least a partly white upbringing are able to flourish among whites by providing black skills without as much self-defeating black attitude. (Any connection between this trend and the popularity among whites of a certain Senator from Illinois is of course utterly coincidental.)

April 18, 2007

"Wow - You called it" writes one reader. "Damn, but you're perceptive," says a another. "Sometimes, you scare me" emails a third.

Okay, what am I blowing my horn over? My shot-in-the-dark guess on Tuesday that the Virginia Tech killer might have been influenced by violent movies from his native South Korea, such as "Old Boy:"

"Nonetheless, let me toss out a bit of wholly unwarranted speculation about the influence of recent South Korean pop culture. South Korean movies and music ... are super cool now in Japan. The trendier Korean movies are, I hear, awfully violent. I made it through about ten minutes before fleeing of the popular South Korean film "Oldboy," which makes Quentin Tarantino's movies look like Erich Rohmer's. It's part of a series with "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance," which I managed to avoid completely. ... I have no idea if the shooter was a fan of pop culture developments in the country he left when he was about ten, but it's a possibility."

A self-shot photo of Mr. Cho, above, and a still from the Web site of the movie ‘Oldboy.’

The inspiration for perhaps the most inexplicable image in the set that Cho Seung-Hui mailed to NBC news on Monday may be a movie from South Korea that won the Gran Prix prize at Cannes Film Festival in 2004. The poses in the two images are similar, and the plot of the movie, “Oldboy,” seems dark enough to merit at least some further study.

Following is The Times’s plot summary: The film centers on a seemingly ordinary businessman, Dae-su (the terrific Choi Min-sik), who, after being mysteriously imprisoned, goes on an extensive, exhausting rampage, seeking answers and all manner of bloody revenge.

In a Times review, Manohla Dargis wrote that the film’s “body count and sadistic violence” mostly appealed to “cult-film aficionados for whom distinctions between high art and low are unknown, unrecognized and certainly unwelcome.”

A Virginia Tech professor, Paul Harrill, alerted us of the similarity between images in the hope that it would shed some light on what led Mr. Cho to kill 32 on Monday before turning the gun on himself.

Keep in mind that this connection is hardly definite (and the pictures aren't exactly the same -- a one-handed grip on a hammer versus a two-handed grip), but the emergence of Cho's picture today is indeed suggestive that I might have been more on to something than on something.

Here's an excerpt from the transcript of Obama's speech in Milwaukee on violence at Virginia Tech, via Powerline:

There's also another kind of violence though that we're gonna have to think about. It's not necessarily physical violence but that the violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways. Last week, the big news, obviously, had to do with Imus and the verbal violence that was directed at young women who were role models for all of us, role models for my daughter. ...[T]hat's a form of violence - it may be quiet, it may not surface to the same level of the tragedy we read about today and we mourn, but it is violence nonethesame.

We [inaudible].... There's the violence of men and women who have worked all their lives and suddenly have the rug pulled out from under 'em because their job has moved to another country. They've lost their job, they've lost their pension benefits, and they've lost their health care and they're having to compete against their teenage children for jobs at the local fast food place paying $7 an hour.

There is the violence of children, whose voices are not heard, in communities that are ignored. Who don't have access to a decent education, who are surrounded by drugs and crime and a lack of hope.

Old fogeys like me will recognize this as a knockoff of Jesse Jackson's 1988 speech at the Democratic Convention:

"What's the fundamental challenge of our day? It is to end economic violence. Plant closings without notice -- economic violence. Even the greedy do not profit long from greed -- economic violence."

Despite all the state-of-the-art glitz of the Obama campaign, the evidence is mounting (see my much denounced article "Obama's Identity Crisis") that Obama is, in his heart, just Jesse Jackson All Over Again.

Of course, if you are running for President, or if you are yapping on the radio for hundreds of hours per year, some of your improvisations are going to fall terribly flat. One could reasonably expect a little forgiveness following an apology, but that is exactly what Sen. Obama did not extend to Imus.

Barack Obama's misguided attempt to connect the Virgina Tech murders with the Imus slur ("quiet violence") and, yes, loss of health care benefits due to layoffs and overseas competition, doesn't come off quite as obscene as you'd expect when you listen to it--because Obama's delivery is too fatigued and subdued, even depressive, to trigger the sense that he's manipulating anybody. Still, it's not exactly evidence of a fresh intelligence, or even basic common sense, at work--much less rising to the occasion. It suggests a mindset that tries to fit every event into a familiar, comforting framework he can spoon-feed his audience without disturbing them. ...

Mickey appears to be picking up on my point that Obama's autobiography has all the hallmarks of being a written by a literarily gifted depressive. Certainly, during Obama's Ross Perot-like rise to near the top of the Presidential candidate heap over the previous couple of years, he didn't show signs of depression. Perhaps, however, he goes through a mild manic-depressive cycle, although not as a blatant as Perot's in 1992. Lots of high achievers do -- you claw your way into power, money, or fame during an up phase and hang on during a down phase.

I don't follow politics enough to have a worthwhile opinion, but I've been picking up hints from the press in the last month that perhaps his depression, if such it is, might be back. Mild manic-depression shouldn't disqualify him for the White House, but it's the kind of thing we ought to know about a candidate -- unlike in 1992 when nobody in the media except Saturday Night Live mentioned that Perot was enormously manic-depressive.

Washington Monthly denounces my Obama article: As I mentioned a couple of months ago, there was an attempt going around D.C. to kill my American Conservative article "Obama's Identity Crisis" before I'd even finished it. Now, the would-be censor, some guy named Alexander Konetzki, recounts in the Washington Monthly his heroic effort to silence my questioning of the Presidential candidate's media image:

Ever since Barack Obama burst onto the political stage in 2004, pundits have taken to calling the junior senator from Illinois a rock star. He inspires, they say, with his youth, intelligence, and soaring oratory. He transcends race.

This flattering picture, which makes even the senator blush, has seldom been challenged by political commentators or the public. And as of mid-March 2007, no one had tried in earnest to subvert the idea that, as president, Obama could help ease America’s racial tensions because his mother was white and his father was black.

But that’s exactly what Steve Sailer, a columnist for the anti-immigration site VDARE.com, tried to do in a piece he submitted to the American Conservative magazine, where, at the time, I was assistant editor. Using quotes from Obama’s 1995 autobiography, Dreams From My Father, Sailer portrayed the senator not as a unifying figure, but as an angry black nationalist who completely rejected his white racial heritage as a young man and might do the same as president.

Well, we can't have people going around reading and even quoting a potential President's autobiography, now can we? Some things, such as Obama's image, are just too sacred to "subvert."

Now, much as I would like to take credit for being the only journalist to notice the blatant contradictions between Obama's campaign spiel and his autobiography, quite a few others have noticed it too. I quote three of them here. Further, Obama's account of his Hawaiian upbringing has since been exploded by the many reporters during the late winter who made the supreme sacrifice of taking an expense account trip to Hawaii to interview Obama's schoolmates.

The Washington Monthly doesn't even bother providing a link to my article, which might allow readers to judge it for themselves.Jim Antle comments in the American Spectator blog:

This kind of groundbreaking investigative reporting is why I read the Washington Monthly. I confess: When I went to work for the American Conservative, I was shocked to discover it was a conservative magazine. Then I came to The American Spectator and quickly learned that by some strange coincidence, it too was a conservative magazine!

With all this conservatism being published in conservative magazines, I don't know what critics of the liberal media are talking about. Fortunately, we can read informative articles about this shocking experience. (Hat tip: The Corner, the blog of yet another conservative magazine.)

Konetzki claims Obama's book "flatly contradicts" my article, but, predictably, he can't document that lie. As for what little that is even allegedly substantive in Konetzki's piece, he disputes my contention:

The happy ending to Dreams is that Obama’s hard-drinking half-brother Roy—“Actually, now we call him Abongo, his Luo name, for two years ago he decided to reassert his African heritage”—converts to teetotaling Islam.

Allow me to suggest opening up Obama's autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race an Inheritance and reading the last page and a half of the book (pp. 441-442 in the paperback), beginning with the sentences:

"The person who made me proudest of all, though, was Roy. Actually, now we call him Abongo, his Luo name, for two years ago he decided to reassert his African heritage.”

Of course, reading Obama's book is not something many of my critics, such as Matt Yglesias (whose attack on me Konetzki approvingly cites), have actually gotten around to doing.

Back in 2000, we elected President a pig in a poke. How'd that work out for us? This time, with Obama, we at least have a non-ghost written autobiography of some literary merit, so we don't have the excuse we had with Bush that he's too boring to think about. But, when it comes to Obama, lots of people just want to hope, not read or think.

According to Ben Smith, Presidential candidate Barack Obama, who called for Don Imus to be fired over an improvised remark, riffed on the Virginia Tech mass murders as follows:

"There's also another kind of violence that we're going to have to think about. It's not necessarily the physical violence, but the violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways," he said, and goes on to catalogue other forms of "violence."

That's one hilariously tin-eared response to a tragedy, lifted straight out of a Jesse Jackson stump speech from 1984. And comparing Virginia Tech to Don Imus is pure self parody.

Of course, if you are running for President, or if you are yapping on the radio for hundreds of hours per year, some of your improvisations are going to fall terribly flat. One could reasonably expect a little forgiveness following an apology, but that is exactly what Sen. Obama did not extend to Imus.

Barack Obama's misguided attempt to connect the Virgina Tech murders with the Imus slur ("quiet violence") and, yes, loss of health care benefits due to layoffs and overseas competition, doesn't come off quite as obscene as you'd expect when you listen to it--because Obama's delivery is too fatigued and subdued, even depressive, to trigger the sense that he's manipulating anybody. Still, it's not exactly evidence of a fresh intelligence, or even basic common sense, at work--much less rising to the occasion. It suggests a mindset that tries to fit every event into a familiar, comforting framework he can spoon-feed his audience without disturbing them. ...

Mickey appears to be picking up on my point that Obama's autobiography has all the hallmarks of being a written by a literarily gifted depressive. Certainly, during Obama's Ross Perot-like rise to near the top of the Presidential candidate heap over the previous couple of years, he didn't show signs of depression. Perhaps, however, he goes through a mild manic-depressive cycle, although not as a blatant as Perot's in 1992. Lots of high achievers do -- you claw your way into power, money, or fame during an up phase and hang on during a down phase.

I don't follow politics enough to have a worthwhile opinion, but I've been picking up hints from the press in the last month that perhaps his depression, if such it is, might be back. Mild manic-depression shouldn't disqualify him for the White House, but it's the kind of thing we ought to know about a candidate -- unlike in 1992 when nobody in the media except Saturday Night Live mentioned that Perot was enormously manic-depressive.

April 17, 2007

Jason Whitlock: As I've mentioned many times before, sportswriters are the rock bottom most pathetic at writing about race. Since race is such a flamingly obvious feature of sports, sportswriters have to be politically correctier than thou at all times to avoid mentioning the elephant in the locker room. Fortunately, one exception is AOL's Jason Whitlock:

I’m calling for Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the president and vice president of Black America, to step down. ... We need to take a cue from White America and re-elect our leadership every four years. White folks realize that power corrupts. That’s why they placed term limits on the presidency. They know if you leave a man in power too long he quits looking out for the interest of his constituency and starts looking out for his own best interest.

We’ve turned Jesse and Al into Supreme Court justices. They get to speak for us for a lifetime.

Why? ...

Rather than inspire us to seize hard-earned opportunities, Jesse and Al have specialized in blackmailing white folks for profit and attention. They were at it again last week, helping to turn radio shock jock Don Imus’ stupidity into a world-wide crisis that reached its crescendo Tuesday afternoon when Rutgers women’s basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer led a massive pity party/recruiting rally.

Hey, what Imus said, calling the Rutgers players "nappy-headed hos," was ignorant, insensitive and offensive. But so are many of the words that come out of the mouths of radio shock jocks/comedians.

Imus’ words did no real damage. Let me tell you what damaged us this week: the sports cover of Tuesday’s USA Today. This country’s newspaper of record published a story about the NFL and crime and ran a picture of 41 NFL players who were arrested in 2006. By my count, 39 of those players were black.

You want to talk about a damaging, powerful image, an image that went out across the globe?

We’re holding news conferences about Imus when the behavior of NFL players is painting us as lawless and immoral. Come on. We can do better than that. Jesse and Al are smarter than that.

Had Imus’ predictably poor attempt at humor not been turned into an international incident by the deluge of media coverage, 97 percent of America would’ve never known what Imus said. His platform isn’t that large and it has zero penetration into the sports world.

Imus certainly doesn’t resonate in the world frequented by college women. The insistence by these young women that they have been emotionally scarred by an old white man with no currency in their world is laughably dishonest.[More]

Another Obama doppelganger: the lady airman conservative blogger: Studying up on the Presidential candidate's life, I came upon an article by an old drinking buddy of his father's, the Kenyan intellectual Philip Ochieng, who reviews the similarities between Obama Sr. and himself and between the Senator and his own abandoned American daughter:

Like Obama Senior, I too went to the US on the famous Tom Mboya Airlift of 1959 [when hundreds of Kenyan students were given scholarships to American universities]. I first met Obama Senior in Tom Mboya's Nairobi office [Mboya was then the secretary general of the Kenya Federation of Labour]. Obama and I met up again on returning to Nairobi and remained drinking buddies for many years.

Back in the US, Nova Diane and I had left each other as soon as Akinyi was born in Chicago. Akinyi is now in her early 40s and yet we have never seen each other. We never even communicated until three years ago, when she finally traced me by e-mail. Barack Obama Junior's book only serves to remind me of the agony that has oppressed Akinyi's mind all these years. The only consolation, if it is one, is that all black people – no matter where they are – really live in two worlds and, therefore, have an identity crisis.

Ochieng's daughter, Juliette Ochieng, who is 14 days apart in age from Sen. Obama, recently retired from the military after 13 years on active duty and then a long career in the U.S. Air Force Reserve. She now maintains a good political blog called Baldilocks (after how short she wears her hair) of the conservative persuasion. She writes:

And, yes, it is slightly disconcerting to know that I owe my existence to the Kennedy family. Good thing that I believe in God’s providence. :-)

In general, I don't really like pontificating off unique and/or extreme events. (For example, Koreans have extremely low murder rates, so this mass murder isn't at all representative of a general pattern for them. Cho may well have doubled the Korean murder rate in America for the year, or even decade.) The sample size for these type of events is too small to determine a previously unobserved trend.

Nonetheless, let me toss out a bit of wholly unwarranted speculation about the influence of recent South Korean pop culture. South Korean movies and music (e.g., hip hop by returning Korean Americans rappers with street cred in Asia because they grew up on the mean streets of San Marino or wherever) are super cool now in Japan. The trendier Korean movies are, I hear, awfully violent. I made it through about ten minutes before fleeing of the popular South Korean film "Oldboy,"which makes Quentin Tarantino's movies look like Erich Rohmer's. It's part of a series with "Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance," which I managed to avoid completely. (Not all South Korean films are quite so carnage-filled.) I have no idea if the shooter was a fan of pop culture developments in the country he left when he was about ten, but it's a possibility.

A more likely connection to pre-existing social patterns is between this loner who first shot a coed whom he considered his girlfriend (while the poor girl seemed to disagree), and the frustrations caused by the Dating Disparity.

Or then again, he may have just been plumb crazy, so speculating won't get us anywhere. We shall see...

A Taiwanese-American reader adds:

"On Virginia Tech, I don't think the media has really examined why the gunman majored in English and his working-class parents let him pursue a major that has very little job prospects and therefore prospects for good relationships with women. Most students of his social circle are urged to find a good major for a good job such as accounting, medicine, law, pharmacy, engineering etc. I recently had a conversation with an older Chinese gentlemen and he said, in his days in Taiwan, if a young man majored in in the humanities, it was impossible for him to find a wife."

Today was the 15th time in the last 17 years that a Kenyan man won the Boston marathon. Kenyans really aren't that good at the marathon, overall Their best events center around 3,000 meters in length, while the marathon is 42,000 meters. But the Kenyans make sure to show up in force for the Boston marathon each spring, which during Olympic years serves as their Olympic qualifying race. Professional marathon running is rather like heavyweight championship boxing -- you can only go all out about twice per year. The Kenyans have a tradition of making Boston their spring showcase, while other nationalities focus more on other marathons.

In recent years, their northern neighbors, the Ethiopians, have been doing particularly well in the marathon and 10,000 meters. Most racial groups have a relative sweet spot length for running, with West Africans and their diaspora most competitive at 100 to400 meters, Kenyans at 800m to 10000m, Northwest Africans at 1500 to 10000, Ethiopians at 5000 to the marathon, Mexicans at 10,000 to the marathon, and Northeast Asians in the marathon. Whites, however, appear to be about the same at most distances, but do the best in the 800m, 1500m, and marathon because those distances fall outside the strong suits of the West Africans and East Africans running superpowers. This suggests that culture can only have a partial effect on world class running success because runners try different distances. If you start out at 800m, you naturally try 400m and 1500m, and if you are better at one of those, you then try 200m or 3000m/5000m, respectively.

My account of why the Kenyans are such good distance runners is here. During the last Olympics, there was a most amusing shoe company commercial starring a Kenyan runner, who reviewed most of the more politically correct theories for Kenyan success with a bemused look on his face. He didn't think much of any of them. He concluded that he doesn't need these expensive shoes to run well, but you do. Then, he turned and joyfully ran off with a breathtakingly hyper-efficient stride.

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